I'm a professional .Net developer for a university in the UK; I play EVE Online, practice languages and I'm currently trying to teach my daughter the Guitar.

I love contributing to StackExchange, it's a great tool for teaching and learning, quite often in the same question!

I have practical and professional experience in C#, SQL (Oracle, MS, MySQL and *Gres), ASP.Net, ASP, C++, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, XML/XSD/XSLT, Cold fusion and Python. I've developed in many different arenas; from Support software to Business operations to Financial services to Demo coding.

To me, Software development and the commitment to it as as much a lifestyle as a career choice; in my personal experience, the best and most motivated (and sometimes most genius) coders are the ones who've taught themselves as much as anything else; people for whom programming doesn't stop at 5pm in the evening, hell - people who often don't stop coding until 5am.

In fact, the kind of people who are still on Stack Overflow at 2am when they need to be up for work in 5 hours, because they can't rest until they've solved that problem.

So; I'll try to answer questions when I don't have a confident basis in the subject area, because learning the answer is just as important as understanding the question.